Lulu Series: Michael Rohd

As many communities have discovered, the arts are a potent tool for public impact and collaboration. Michael Rohd, founder of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, will offer insights into developing collaborative projects with community and civic organizations. By engaging in a community-defined needs-focused practice, his work reveals new ways of using the assets and experiences of artists to build healthier communities and new organizational stakeholders.

Michael Rohd is Executive Director of Center for Performance and Civic Practice and founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre, a 17-year old ensemble-based company and 2005 recipient of Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy Exemplar Award. He is the recipient of the 2015 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater and the 2015 Robert Gard Foundation Award for Excellence. His widely translated book, Theatre for Community, Conflict and Dialogue (Heinemann Press, 1998) is now in its 15th printing, and he currently helps lead the MFA Directing Program at Northwestern University. Recent and current projects include leading a two-year Sojourn Artist-in-Residence collaboration with Catholic Charities USA poverty reduction sites throughout the US; collaborations with Steppenwolf Theater, Singapore Drama Educators Association and Americans for the Arts; and, working with theatres and universities to mount local projects based on Sojourn’s model performance/engagement process/production How To End Poverty in 90 Minutes.

This talk will be preceded by a short performance by hip hop/spoken word artist, beat-boxer, cultural dancer and youth educator Jerilynn Webster, aka JB the First Lady, a member of the Nuxalk and Onondaga Nations. JB has released four albums, been nominated five times at the Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards and is the only female ever to be nominated for Best Hip Hop Album (twice). JB wants young indigenous women to feel proud, inspired, and to see someone on stage that looks like them, representing indigenous women in mainstream media.